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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,276

A relatively inexpensive egg-based formula and a Star Trek-like plasma patch can accelerate healing of serious and chronic wounds, which affect millions of Europeans every year.

According to trade association MedTech Europe, around 4 million people in the EU develop non-healing wounds each year. These are most commonly bedsores or diabetic ulcers, and the problem is likely to become worse as lower birth rates and higher life expectancy means the European population is getting older.

Dr. Carsten Mahrenholz from German company COLDPLASMATECH says that physicians tend to just re-dress as they are very hard to heal. But he warns that the current issues we are experiencing with multidrug-resistant bacteria means that we are on the brink of a return to the Middle Ages in terms of our susceptibility to infection.

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This fantastic project will involve sharing visual images between two brains. It will read the vision of a sighted person and transfer the images this person sees into the brain of a blind person “telepathically” in less than 1/20th of a second.

A team of neuroengineers has begun working on a headset or a helmet that directly links the human brain to machines without the need for surgery. This headset and the technologies that power it will enable this telepathic visual sharing.

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Scientists really never back down. A new dental replacement procedure is in the works, and it could be a whole lot better than getting regular dentures or standard implants.

Losing a tooth is a source of major pain, and it also comes with a lot of issues and long-term discomforts. Dentures are one way to replace a lost or bad tooth, but they come with a lot of burdens on their own.

It takes a while to get used to having teeth you were not born with, and some people’s gums and jaw bones are just not suitable to receive implants.

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Age is a leading risk factor for a number of conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease among others, such conditions make a real need for development of anti-aging therapies urgent. Salk Institute researchers may have developed a new gene therapy to help decelerate the aging process, as published in the journal Nature Medicine.

CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing therapy has been shown by the Salk Institute team to suppress the accelerated aging observed in mice with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome; and provided insight into the molecular pathways involved in accelerated aging, and how to reduce toxic proteins via gene therapy.

Having an early onset and fast progression progeria is a severe form of degenerative disorder caused by LMNA gene mutations; signs of accelerated aging include DNA damage, cardiac dysfunction, and dramatically shortened lifespan. LMNA genes produce lamin A and lamin C inside a cell, progeria shifts production of lamin A to progerin which is a toxic shortened form of lamin A that accumulates with age and becomes exacerbated with the condition.

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UMBC’s Hua Lu, professor of biological sciences, and colleagues have found new genetic links between a plant’s circadian rhythm (essentially, an internal clock) and its ability to fend off diseases and pests. The findings were 10 years in the making and published in Nature Communications this week. The results could eventually lead to plants that are more resistant to disease-causing pathogens and better treatment for human diseases.

“It’s quite cool,” Lu says, “because, in both and animals, people are beginning to study the crosstalk between the clock and the immunity system.”

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